Citi's Fitzpatrick: Gold on its way to $3,500, silver $100

The gold price on Thursday lost its recent upward momentum, as military action in Syria is delayed and strong economic numbers from the US dampen demand.

By mid-afternoon the yellow metal was trading around $1,405 an ounce, down from a more than two-month intraday high of $1,434 reached yesterday.

Silver's good run was also interrupted on Thursday with the metal dropping 1.7% to below $24 an ounce.

Citigroup strategist and technical expert Tom Fitzpatrick told Bloomberg on Thursday that gold and silver prices have have bottomed and that the yellow metal could end the year above $1,500.

A gain of 6.8% from today’s prices, but still well below gold's 2013 opening levels of $1,670. Silver is down 20% from January levels of above $30 an ounce.

In a separate interview with King World News, Fitzpatrick talked about longer term trends for the gold price and predicted the gold price to more than double and silver to triple.

Within the gold dynamic, we believe this recent correction was very similar to what the gold market witnessed from 1974 to 1976 — as the equity markets recovered from the bear market bottom in 1974. In this instance, very recently gold went 14% below the 55-month moving average, exactly as it did back in 1976.

After the low in gold in 1976, the equity market peaked 4 weeks later. So far, following the $1,181 low in gold, the peak in the equity markets has been 5 weeks thereafter. And as we started that historic upward movement in gold, beginning in 1976, this was also when the equity market peaked and went into a corrective phase, and that is when gold really came into its own.

So we believe we are back into that track where gold is the hard currency of choice, and we expect for this trend to accelerate going forward. We still believe that in the next couple of years we will be looking at a gold price of around $3,500. As the gold/silver ratio plummets near 30, this would also suggest a silver price above $100.”

Frik is editor and writer for MINING.com. Frik has worked as a financial journalist for 15 years appearing in a number of business and consumer publications including British Airways in-flight magazine, Business Insider, Fin24.com, Driving.ca, YCharts and Business in Vancouver. Frik was a speaker at the 2014 Global Mining Summit in Las Vegas and the Mine Lifecycle Management conference in Salt Lake City.
(DISCLAIMER: Frik Els does not own shares or hold positions in any of the equities he writes about. Nothing written should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. Seek the advice of a broker/dealer first.)